June 08, 2013

Friendly rejoinder to genetiker

genetiker calls me "dumber than he thought" and responds to my criticism of his model. As always, I will disregard the name calling and deal with the (much more interesting) facts.

First, he writes:

In his post Dienekes takes the phylogeny I used for running the F4 ratio estimation program and shows that it won’t work for f3 statistics.

No kidding.

No kidding indeed. Either genetiker believes in his phylogeny or he doesn't. The fact that the F4 ratio estimation program requires a phylogeny with that structure is meaningless: as I have shown, that phylogeny is wrong because it makes a prediction that is falsified by the data. Garbage in-garbage out, so the estimates obtained by genetiker with the wrong phylogeny are of course... wrong.

Second, he presents an even more elaborate phylogeny, where "V is Veddoids, C is Caucasoids, M is Mediterraneans, N is Nordics, G is Mongoloids, S is Sardinians, E is Europeans, and A is Amerindians."

This phylogeny is of course also wrong, for at least two reasons:

It ignores post-admixture drift in Europeans, i.e., the drift that has accumulated after E was formed by M+N. This drift is always traversed in the same direction from E to S and to A, so it contributes a constant positive term in the value of F3(E; S,A)

It proposes instantaneous formation of S, E, and A, e.g., the "Nordic" component in Europeans is symmetrically related to the "Nordic" component in Sardinians and Amerindians. genetiker clearly does not believe this, since he argues in his site (i) for I-M26 bearing "White Gods" coming to the Americas via the Canary islands, (ii) that mtDNA haplogroup X in the Americas is Caucasoid and so is (iii) Y-haplogroup C, which although "originally Veddoid" was carried by "Caucasoids" into the Americas. Now there's zero evidence that any of this has anything to do with Caucasoids, let alone Nordics in the Americas, but in any case it would be nice if genetiker harmonized his convoluted model of "Nordic" migrations with his phylogeny. In other words, his mental model of what happened isn't only inconsistent with the data, it's also inconsistent with itself.

Finally, genetiker attempts to work out the mathematical details of his model, arriving at the conclusion that:

There are four paths from Europeans to Sardinians and four paths from Europeans to Amerindians, so there are sixteen path combinations.

This is of course wrong, because these paths are not independent; one actually needs to sum over 8 (=2^3) different trees for the different combinations of α, β and γ in the model; genetiker is therefore using wrong math applied to a wrong model. I believe his confusion stems from conflating admixture edges with drift edges.

It is not clear what he has aimed to accomplish with this "model", but let's analyze it properly:

If α,β or 1-α,1-β then because of the instantaneous derivation of S,E from M and N respectively there is no drift in the degenerated length-0 "path" E-to-S, and hence F3(E; S,A) = 0. So, we only have to consider the cases α, 1-β and 1-α, β:

If 1-γ then if α,1-β we have drift overlap MC, or if β,1-α we have drift overlap CN

If γ then then if α,1-β we have drift overlap MC+CN, or if β,1-α we have drift overlap 0

So, in total we have a positive F3(E; S, A) statistic again, since we are summing over positive or zero drifts. If we also added the post-admixture drift in E, that statistic would be even higher -although this is not really necessary to falsify genetiker's model.

In any case, I still applaud genetiker for engaging with the data, and I'm happy to contribute to his continuing education!

15 comments:

My advice to genetiker is to cut out the rudeness. Perhaps he imagines that his readers delight and snigger at his rudeness and think that he is clever and that he has somehow "won" the debate. That is the sort of behaviour that I might expect from adolescent yobbos who have never had the importance of respect impressed upon them by their parents or by the wider community and it is an insult to the reader. Frankly his rudeness is as unpleasant for the reader as he may imagine it to be for his opponent. For instance it is totally unacceptable behaviour to use phrases like "Dienekes is dumber", to detract from someone's very name and reputation with mere alliteration. It is moronic and painful to behold. Try to act like a gentleman and to address your readers as gentlemen and women. That would impress me, not rudeness. At least try to act like a mature adult who grasps the important of politeness, that is all that most people ask.

The problem is that we know that Northern Europeans invaded North America. We have no evidence that I am aware of that Amerindians ever occupied any part of Europe. If Amerindians ever occupied Europe then where is the archaeological evidence?

Note, the Mixmapper paper alternatively shows that this migration (by a population that is remotely related to one ancestral to Native Americans and, only in part, to Siberians) affected all West Eurasians (including Middle Eastern) and people we would call Caucasoid.

This paper also theorises that a negative f3 statistic is not present in Sardinians and Basques due to a combination of being relatively low in ancestry derived from this migration and drift, which is plausible based on location and history. Removing the Sardinians as an unadmixed population and using instead an unadmixed simulated West Eurasian admixture edge also has knock on (increasing) effects on the estimation of the amount of North Asian mix in Sardinian like populations, such as in the Middle East and Southern Europe.

We know that humans did not originate in either Europe or America so they must have arrived in both regions from somewhere else. We can also be fairly sure that American Y-DNA Q entered America from Central/West Asia and via some route through Siberia. The same holds for mt-DNA X. Q is 'related' to R, a common European haplogroup, and it too appears to have entered Europe from Central/West Asia also. I'll leave someone else to provide any archaeological evidence in support.

"We know that humans did not originate in either Europe or America so they must have arrived in both regions from somewhere else. We can also be fairly sure that American Y-DNA Q entered America from Central/West Asia and via some route through Siberia. The same holds for mt-DNA X. Q is 'related' to R, a common European haplogroup, and it too appears to have entered Europe from Central/West Asia also."

As haplogroup Q is related to haplogroup R, it is also almost equally related to haplogroup N, haplogroup O, haplogroup M, haplogroup S, or haplogroup MNOPS*. The difference between the STR variance of {Q+R} and the STR variance of {M+N+O+Q+R+S+MNOPS*}, i.e. the whole of MNOPS, is miniscule.

My advice to Genetiker is to cut out genetics at all. If someone commits such blatant logical fallacies he is unfit to contribute anything to science and research. His motives are obviously not such, however. He's a nordicist propagandist. It wouldn't be far-fatched to surmise that even his choice of the German word "Genetiker" is linked to his nordicist orientation.

Average Joe, not really. There is some evidence of the opposite, though.

My guess is what Dienekes is seeing is similarity between sammi and innuit which are distantly related. Sammi became a pretty big part of scandinavia after the plague so a small similarity to the most recent ancient migrants to north america would be more than enough to give that result.

"As haplogroup Q is related to haplogroup R, it is also almost equally related to haplogroup N, haplogroup O, haplogroup M, haplogroup S, or haplogroup MNOPS*. The difference between the STR variance of {Q+R} and the STR variance of {M+N+O+Q+R+S+MNOPS*}, i.e. the whole of MNOPS, is miniscule".

Yes but ... The phylogeny does show that it was not a simple 7 way split. We have MNOPS first. Followed by M, NO, P and S. Then P formed R and Q, by which time the population containg P could have move some considerable distance form where it branched from MNOPS. The same holds for NO. I agree that N, O1, O2 and O3 all branched at roughly the same time but we really have no idea how much after the formation of NO from MNOPS that was.

Lol, that Genetiker is a psycho, look what he wrote recently, quotation:

The Anzick 1 genome was of course seized upon by the ideologues and propagandists of the corrupt “scientific community” as conclusive proof that the Solutrean hypothesis is false, and it is of course no such thing. (...)

Finally, a word about priority.

In November of last year Eske Willerslev and his associates falsely took credit for “revealing” that Amerindians are Mongoloid-Caucasoid hybrids, a fact which I had been revealing over the preceding 8 months. The idea that the “scientific community” was unaware that I had been revealing this fact is not plausible, as my revelation of it involved the public humiliation of the world’s most widely read anthropology blogger. Among the members of the “scientific community” that read Dienekes’ blog is Nick Patterson, one of David Reich’s closest associates. Dienekes’ posts about my refutation of one of Reich’s major claims certainly would have been of interest to Patterson.

My K = 26 admixture analysis of Amerindians and Mestizos showed that Maya and Peruvians have Caucasoid admixture which cannot possibly be from the post-Columbian Spanish. This is a scientific discovery of the greatest importance. I’m putting the “scientific community” on notice right now that if any of them attempt to take credit for this discovery, I will do everything in my power to expose the falsity of their claims.

"In November of last year Eske Willerslev and his associates falsely took credit for “revealing” that Amerindians are Mongoloid-Caucasoid hybrids, a fact which I had been revealing over the preceding 8 months".

With the information available at the time I had come to the same conclusion around 2005. This essay was posted in 2009 but is fairly much a re-run of my earlier thoughts:

There's not much I would change although it has become obvious the source of the Eurasian mixture was not 'Europe'. And in the first map I would place the more southerly East Asian group as having come direct from the south, not from Central Eurasia.

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